(We’re mashing up current events with Hamlet, the whole play, and you can start here in the middle or with this post.)

We are now in Elsinore Castle (Denmark’s royal castle is located in the smaller town of Kronborg, not the city of Copenhagen), where the new king, Claudius, is holding court, offering the State of the Union address that President Biden has apparently dispensed with this year. Speaking regally for the nation, he acknowledges the grief all feel for King Hamlet’s death:

Claudius: “Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother’s death
The memory be green, and that it us befitted
To bear our hearts in grief and our whole kingdom
To be contracted in one brow of woe,
Yet so far hath discretion fought with nature
That we with wisest sorrow think on him
Together with remembrance of ourselves.”

Except for his smooth and almost hypnotic way with words, Claudius is otherwise a very plausible Biden. He has (we learn later) installed himself as king by killing King Hamlet (we will substitute ballot stuffing and enjoying a compliant media). He goes on:

Claudius: “Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen,
Th’ imperial jointress to this warlike state,
Have we, as ’twere with a defeated joy –
With an auspicious and a dropping eye,
With mirth in funeral and with a dirge in marriage,
In equal scale weighing delight and dole –
Taken to wife.”

How’s that? Claudius has “taken to wife” his “sometime sister”? The new king is so smooth in describing how, in the midst of the nation’s grief, he has gone about marrying his late brother’s widow, that he almost makes it sound normal.

Oh, and just for fun, we’ll note that his list of contradictions (defeated joy; with mirth in funeral; with a dirge in marriage) mirrors Romeo used to describe his infatuation with Rosaline, before he met Juliet (Feather of lead; bright smoke; cold fire; sick health).

Claudius: “….Nor have we herein barred
Your better wisdoms, which have freely gone
With this affair along.”

Claudius hints here that his fellow Danes found the marriage questionable, and while it’s not made clear whose better wisdoms were consulted, most likely it was the nobility and the church.

We are left with a newly installed king choosing to marry his brother’s widow during the very moment of the nation’s grief. For a parallel, imagine President Kennedy’s widow, Jackie Kennedy, marrying Bobby Kennedy (had Bobby been single and vice president instead of married and merely Attorney General) just after JFK’s assassination, perhaps while she was still wearing the dress that was red with her murdered husband’s blood. Or (heaven forfend) Biden and Melania becoming implausibly conjoined following Trump’s departure from the White House.

And since we know Melania would dismiss this prospect out of hand, and we also know Kamala Harris would jump to her knees at the opportunity, however repulsed she might be personally, we’ll cast Kamala as Gertrude.

We move onto geopolitics. Claudius describes the threat to Denmark posed by Fortinbras, who thinks Denmark is too weak to hold onto the lands King Hamlet won from Norway in a prior war:

Claudius: “Now follows that you know young Fortinbras,
Holding a weak supposal of our worth,
Or thinking by our late dear brother’s death
Our state to be disjoint and out of frame…
He hath not failed to pester us with message
Importing the surrender of those lands
Lost by his father, with all bonds of law,
To our most valiant brother.”

We could substitute Russia salivating over Crimea when Claudius was portrayed by Obama (China took and kept Crimea at that time and met with no objection, come to think of it), or China salivating now over Taiwan, restrained only by a Biden Claudius.

With his review of these affairs of state concluded, are we at last ready to meet Hamlet? No. Claudius will address his nephew, the main character of the central literary work of the English language, only after he receives Laertes, the son of his advisor Polonius:

Claudius: “…What wouldst thou beg, Laertes,
That shall not be my offer, not thy asking?
The head is not more native to the heart,
The hand more instrumental to the mouth,
Than is the throne of Denmark to thy father.
What wouldst thou have, Laertes?”

Laertes: “My dread lord,
Your leave and favor to return to France,
From whence though willingly I came to Denmark
To show my duty in your coronation,
Yet now I must confess, that duty done,
My thoughts and wishes bed against toward France
And bow them to your gracious leave and pardon.”…

Claudius: “Take thy fair hour, Laertes. Time be thine,
And thy best graces spend it at thy will!”

Hamlet, the crown prince, has been waiting all this time. Just as Israel waited for weeks after Biden was inaugurated to receive any communication from the White House. And just as Great Britain has now been told a trade agreement may not be arranged even within Biden’s first term, as punishment for Brexit. Finally, this:

Claudius: “But now, my cousin Hamlet, and my son –”

 

Hope you’re enjoying this mashup of Hamlet and current events. The Blogging Hamlet series starts with this post.